Address for Correspondence: Marton Demeter, email: mail.demeter.marton[at]gmail.com

Article received on the 24th August, 2018. Article accepted on the 04th December, 2018.

Acknowledgements: This paper was supported by the János Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian

Academy of Sciences.

Conflict of Interest: The author is the co-EiC of KOME.

Original Article

Marton Demeter1 1Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church in Hungary, HUNGARY

Abstract: In this paper we theoretically interpret empirical results regarding academic habits

in communication and media studies. The theoretical framework used is Bourdieu’s frame

theory throughout the analysis. The purpose of this effort is twofold. First, we argue that the

Bourdieusian theory is an adequate theoretical frame for explaining existing data on academic

performance and especially on international inequalities in communication and media studies.

Second, we will make attempt towards a synthetized theoretical exposition of field theory by

connecting main concepts and demonstrate dynamical interactions between them.

Keywords: field theory, communication and media studies, de-Westernization, Pierre Bourdieu,

academic capital

Introduction

The history of communication and media studies (CMS) is rife with arguments for and against

one of the most salient features of the discipline: its obvious Euro-America centrism. Lots of

empirical research have conducted to investigate the measure of this Global North and South

bias in the field in CMS: most of them deals with the publication output and the citation scores

of different world regions (Demeter, 2017, 2018a; Freelon, 2013; Lauf, 2005; Waisbord, 2015a;

Waisbord, 2015b; Wang, 2014). Most researchers consider North America, Oceania, Western

Europe and the developed Asia (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and Hong Kong) as parts of

the Global North, and South America, the developing Asia, Africa, the Middle East as parts of

the Global South. Eastern Europe has a specific place since it is either considered as part of the

Global North (Lauf, 2005) or the Global South (Author, 2018b; Heilbron et al., 2018) and there

also are researchers that not even mention this part of the world (Hallin and Mancini, 2005).

Based on the recognition that in terms of its history, its economic features and its marginal

political position Eastern Europe has much more in common with other parts of the Global

South than those of the Global North, we consider Eastern Europe as part of the former.

While we have great bulks of empirical research on this topic, academics in CMS

somehow failed to produce a detailed and convincing theory that could explain the dynamics

of the processes that leads to the international bias against the Global South. In this current

paper we use the Bourdieusian field theory (Bourdieu, 1988; 1998; 2004) to frame the field of

KOME − An International Journal of Pure

Communication Inquiry

Volume 6 Issue 2, p. 92-110.

© The Author(s) 2018

Reprints and Permission:

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Published by the Hungarian Communication

Studies Association

DOI: 10.17646/KOME.75692.94

Theorizing international inequalities

in communication and media studies.

A field theory approach

Demeter, M. 93

CMS: we will examine the field-controlling norms (Rothenberger et al., 2017), the habitus of

communication scholars and their academic capital that has been collected during their career.

Since we would like to provide a coherent picture of the field of CMS, we will not just interpret

the most important Bourdieusian concepts through this particularly discipline, but we also

connecting and cross-referring the main analytical terms with each other. As a result, we will

get a synthetized theory on communication, as a unique academic field with its special types of

preferred habitus, norms and capital. We have to emphasize the interpretative nature of our

analysis since we haven’t attempt to simply summarize or recite the orthodox Bourdieusian

theory but we rather consider the basic concepts of field theory as tools that could be used

flexibly.

Global North – Global South bias in the field of CMS

Analyzing publication patterns in CMS dates back as early as 1989, when Communication

Research published its special issue (Vol 16 Issue 4) dedicated to this topic. Later analyses on

publication patterns dealt with citation networks in CMS journals (Borgman, 1989; Borgman

and Reeves, 1983; Bunz, 2005; Feeley, 2008; Funkhouser, 1996; Rice, Borgman and Reeves,

1988; Rogers, 1999). In terms of publication inequalities, the most important papers were

published in 2005, in which Edmund Lauf analyzed the international diversity of 40 SSCI

journals in CMS, and in 2018, when (Demeter, 2018a) analyzed the national diversity of

communication journals in Scopus. Both research found a very low level of internationality

with an overwhelming American predomination. The second best performing region was

Western Europe, followed by the developed parts of Asia. The contribution of the Global South

(including Africa, South America, the developing Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe)

was almost unnoticeable. Lauf (2005) found the same bias in terms of editorial board

membership of leading journals in CMS: beside the overrepresentation of the US and some

Western countries, the contribution of the Global South was minimal or even totally absent.

Former research already tried to find at least partial explanations for the phenomenon

of the Global North’s overrepresentation in CMS. The first type of explanations suggests that

beside cultural, linguistic and epistemic factors, the economic indicators of world regions plays

critical role in their international publication output. For example, correlations between the

GDP, per capita GDP and the publication success of a given region were find in some empirical

research (Demeter, 2018a; Lauf, 2005). In short, economic explanations state that economic

well-being of a given country determines, at least partly, the publication success of a CMS

scholar working in that country. The second type of explanations deals with the historical facts

behind the field of CMS (Pooley and Park, 2013; Simonson et al., 2013; Waisbord and Mellado,

2014.) The so-called “received history” of the field (Pooley and Park, 2013) tells us that the

discipline begins with the study of propaganda in the US, and all the four “founders of

communication studies”, namely Kurt Lewin, Carl Hovland, Harold Lasswell and Lazarsfeld –

were American, at least in terms of their education. The same authors also point out that most

historians of CMS simply ignored the Global South, and this could be conceived as a patterned

neglect of non-Western scholarship. In terms of academic institutionalization, the Euro-

American precedency is also obvious: the first university-based communication education

(mostly in journalism) were established in American, German and French universities in the

first years of the 20th century. It was also in the US where “communication was first

institutionalized as an academic field in the decades after World War II” (Simonson et al., 2013,

p. 26). Finally, we have a political-historical explanation (Lauk, 2015) that deals with the fact

that in most parts of the Global South there was a repressive political regime for decades that

made the development of CMS literally impossible. The typical example is the state socialism

of all Eastern European and some Asian, South American and African countries. In other

Demeter, M. 94

counties, there were, and in some cases, there is still military or religious dictatorship. The

serious deficiencies in free speech, the absence of press freedom, the prohibition of

international traveling and the lack of appropriate language learning led to isolation from the

international scientific community especially in the case of the ideologically more sensitive

social sciences (Kornai, 1992).

The field of forces in the Bourdieusian theory and in CMS

Bourdieu conducted heroic efforts to emphasize the role that the field of forces plays in

academic life, and his later followers dedicated an enormous amount of research to this topic

(Bauder, 2015; Bauder et al., 2017; Grenfell, 2008; Gouanvic, 2005; Hilgers and Mangez,

2015; Leung, 2013; Recke, 2011; Rothenberger et al., 2017; Thatcher et al., 2016; Wacquant,

2018; Wiedemann and Meyen, 2016). According to the original Bourdieusian idea, the field is

“the space of the relations of force between the different kinds of capital or, more precisely,

between the agents who possess a sufficient amount of one of the different kinds of capital to

be in a position to dominate the corresponding field” (Bourdieu, 1988, p. 34). The field of

forces (the original le champ is sometimes translated as field of power or simply force field)

has the well-established institutions of the Kuhnian normal science which entails the ruling

academic language and rhetoric (Oshima-Hogue, 1999; Liu et al., 2018), high valued

affiliations like world class universities and research institutions (Neuman etl al, 2008), leading

journals, main publishers, selection committee memberships, administrative positions

(Asheulova and Dushina, 2014) or university rankings (Pietrucha, 2018).Therefore, the field of

forces consists of many subfields or institutions (Fig. 1) that are tightly interwoven with each

other in various ways.

Demeter, M. 95

Figure 1. The constituents of the field of forces

Each subfield of the field of forces holds possession of some institutional power. Selection

committees can decide the career paths of individual researchers by prescribing the price of

entry (Bourdieu, 2004) and the tenure conditions. Earlier in their career, international

communication scholars should publish at least one or two papers in leading periodicals,

preferably in ICA or NCA journals for a successful tenure application proposed to any

acknowledged institution (Pooley, 2015). Because of their almost absolute power in

determining career possibilities of young researchers, selection committees play the role of

gatekeepers to the field of forces. The earlier mentioned international scientific communities

like ICA, NCA or IAMCR play serious roles in the field of forces of CMS, and the bias against

Global South authors is well known in case of all these associations (Wiedemann and Mayen,

2016; Zelizer, 2015). Another important factor of the field of forces is language, more

precisely, the academic English of the international community of CMS scholars. As both Lauf

(2005) and (Demeter, 2018a) puts it, leading periodicals in CMS publish English content

exclusively. Even if being published, non-English articles suffer from lower citation scores than

English papers (Liu et al., 2018). It is obvious then, that this fact results in serious bias against

non-English authors since they should learn a second language on a professional level as an

Demeter, M. 96

extra investment, and they presumably read and write slower than their native English peers

(Horn, 2017). Moreover, beside the language itself, they should also master the Anglo-Saxon

rhetoric and academic writing skills (Oshima and Hogue, 1999). Beside language and selection

criteria, the field of forces also determines the preferred thematic clusters (Freelon, 2013;

Günther and Domahidi, 2017; Neuman et al., 2008). Empirical research show that in CMS,

some orthodox topics of research are preferred, typically those of with American focus, and

research conducted with quantitative social science methods is easier to publish than those of

written on non-Western topics and conducted by non-mainstream approaches. The

characteristic clusters in CMS are interpersonal communication, race and media, parasocial

interaction, multimedia, political communication, hostile media, psychology of communication

and agenda setting Freelon, 2013). Moreover, all these clusters have their “citation universes”

and received methodologies. In order to being published, most early career scholars tend to

achieve their research in the orthodox thematic clusters, with the orthodox methods and based

on the orthodox literature. Science policy and state strategies works on the macro-level and

their effects on the field of forces raises with the decline of the relative autonomy of the

sciences. When the state abandons the sciences by cutting their funding, as it has been happened

in the case of Russia and many other Eastern European regions, the most talented researchers

will try to move towards more prosperous regions. The opposite is true when the state

deliberately invests in academic institutions and research programs, like in China, because it

results in strengthened academic life (Asheulova and Dushina, 2014). University rankings and

journal rankings like Scopus or SSCI play also important role in organizing the field of forces,

since international students and the most mobile international scholars will target the top ranked

universities (Pietrucha, 2018). In the case of Shanghai Ranking, research output is one of the

most important categories with extraordinary emphasis on SSCI papers. Other rankings like the

QS World University Ranking or The Times Higher Education World University Ranking also

calculate with the publication output of the employees. Lecturing at the top ranked universities

and publishing in the top ranked periodicals results in prestige and a great amount of academic

capital. Finally, besides selection committee members, publishers, editorial board members

and reviewers also play the role of gatekeepers in the field of forces, since they could determine

the publication output of international researchers. We have 293 Scopus-indexed and 79 SSCI

indexed periodicals in CMS (in 2017). Most Scopus-indexed and all SSCI indexed journals are

published in the Global North (Demeter, 2018a, 2018b), and most editorial boards consist of

Global North editorial board members (Lauf, 2005). It means that the field of forces is strongly

biased against Global South authors from these respects, too.

The habitus, the norms and collecting academic capital in CMS

Habitus is one of the main concepts of Bourdieu’s field theory, and it refers to some durable

and transposable dispositions or tendencies social agents have in order to being active during

social actions (Grenfell, 2008). Regarding habitus in practice, the most important empirical

phenomenon in career development is the mobility of researchers, because it effects on other

parts of the habitus like publication habits (Aksnes et al., 2013), proper conduct (Rothenberger

et al., 2017), cooperation skills (Henriksen, 2018; Ronda-Pupo and Katz, 2018) or networking

(Bormann, 2017; Coccia and Bozemann, 2016).

Demeter, M. 97

Figure 2. The constituents of habitus

The general rule of mobility is that talent often flows from the Global South to the core as

scholars seek out employment in recognized institutions of higher learning in the Global North

(Lee and Kuzhabekova, 2017). Mobility, that is, being educated or work abroad raises the

symbolic or academic capital of researchers in a great extent, while immobility often results in

narrowed career paths. The motivations between mobility include simply economic features

like higher salary or better material-technical conditions, but research show that the promotion

of scientific visibility – growth in publication output, coauthored international publications or

the increase of citation indices – also play very important role (Asheulova and Dushina, 2014;

Aksnes et al., 2013). Moreover, internalization, that is, the concept of a neoliberal and global

university (Herschberg et al., 2018) became a keyword or norm that most universities should

strive for. Mobility as a habitus, therefore, became not just an important source of academic

capital for individual researchers, but a valuable feature that international universities support

and appreciate as well. For mobility is the most important factor when Global South academics

wish to raise their academic capital, it is expected that more mobile authors will collect more

capital. Amongst the most obvious examples of “entry level” (Bourdieu, 2004) academic

capital like BA, MA or PhD degrees accomplished in the Global North, scientists could collect

advanced types of capital in the form of Global North postdoctoral research experience,

international grants, Global North affiliations (Shen et al., 2018) and, mostly, publications in

leading periodicals (Cole, 1967; Hanssen et al., 2017). Networking, collaboration and

coauthorship are also sources of measurable academic capital in terms of both citation and

publication output (Bormann, 2017; Coccia and Bozemann, 2016; Henriksen, 2018; Katz,

1999; Ronda-Pupo and Katz, 2018).

The role of norms in the Bourdieusian theory was extensively investigated by Rothenberger et

al. (2017), but we should still relate them directly to the field of CMS (Fig. 3).

habitus

publication habits

cooperation habits

mobilitynetworking, social skills

proper conduct

Demeter, M. 98

Figure 3. The constituents of norms

Following Neuman et al. (2008) we could state that there are a bunch of norms that play crucial

role in assessing a communication scholar’s work. We have norms like importance, theoretical

integration, methodology, completeness, normative connection and originality. Based on their

extensive analysis on peer review decisions the authors find that the most important norms are

clarity (of the research paper), methodology and theoretical integration, while importance,

originality and normative connection turned out to be marginal as selection criteria which

means that, in most cases, reviewers wrote that the paper was important and original. According

to their research, however, the most important norms are related to the theory used:

“we have thus far come to the conclusion that theory is king. Without a clear connection to an

identifiable theoretical corpus and providing an original contribution to that corpus, pristine

prose or magnificent methods do not provide the key to scholarly recognition.” (Neuman et al.,

2008, p. 230)

These underlying norms determinate the prospect of scientists to publish their articles in

prestigious journals since, in order to being published, they should be familiar with basal norms.

In a less extent, the opposite could also be true, for scientific communities could affect serious

methodological or epistemic change (Estrade, Hernandez and Schulz, 2018). It is noteworthy

that publishing in leading periodicals is not an optional but a necessary assignment when a

researcher plans an international career, for the most important condition for professional

success represented in tenure and hiring decisions is based on publications in leading peer-

reviewed journals (King et al., 2017; Zdenek, 2017). Since most norms are learned through

education, and leading journals are published exclusively at the Global North, authors educated

in the Global South face significant challenges when trying to publish their research in the most

prestigious periodicals (Lauf, 2005). Acquiring and adopt these norms through being mobile

norms

importance

completeness

theory

normative connection

originalityintegration

methodology

clarity

rules of proper conduct

Demeter, M. 99

and have Global North education is, therefore, essential to a successful research career (Meyen,

2012; Wiedemann and Meyen 2016). In other words, especially for those academics from the

Global South, mobility turned out to be the most effective habitus to collect capital.

Bourdieu’s notion of capital could be roughly conceived as the extension of the

economic sense of the concept, since Bourdieu's purpose is to extend the sense of the term

"capital" by employing it in a wider system of exchanges whereby assets of different kinds are

transformed and exchanged within complex networks or circuits within and across different

fields. He is attempting to relocate the narrow instance of mercantile exchange away from

economics into a wider anthropology of cultural exchanges and valuations of which the

economic is only one (though the most fundamental) type. It is important to note, however, that

other forms of capital such as cultural and social can be seen as "transubstantiated" forms of

economic capital. (Grenfell, 2008, p. 102).

On the basis of the literature of Bourdieusian theory we could distinguish four kinds of capital

(Fig. 4).

Figure 4. The constituents of capital

The first and most obvious category is the academic capital that could be accumulated in the

form of certifications, degrees, fellowships, research grants and work experience. Academic

capital that has been collected in the top of the hierarchy (typically, in the US and other English-

speaking countries) is much more valuable than those of collected in rather peripheral countries

(Bauder, 2015; Bauder et al., 2017). Another type of capital is the social capital, which consists

of demonstrable records of participating in international collaborations, research groups and

capital

symbolic

• peer recognition

• citation

• publications

• positions (EBM, Tenure Committee)

economic

• salary

• funds

• fellowship

social

• international projects

• research gropus

• science networks

• coauthorship

academic

• degrees

• experience

• certifications

Demeter, M. 100

science networks, like ICA and NCA in the case of CMS. Also, a quite impressive

demonstration of the social capital of individual researchers is the number of their international

coauthored papers (Bormann, 2017; Ronda-Pupo and Katz. 2018). Research shows that the

increase of social capital in the form of coauthored papers also effects increased citation scores

(Henriksen, 2018). Again, since the field of CMS is fairly hierarchical and biased towards Euro-

American institutions (publishers, journals, universities and affiliations), researchers from the

Global South try to cooperate strategically with Global North authors. By contrast, Global

North authors cooperate, mostly, with each other, and their cooperation with Global South

authors is rather idiosyncratic (Demeter, 2017). The third type of capital is the economic

capital, and research shows that this is one of the main factors behind labor migration towards

the Global North (Asheulova and Dushina, 2014). Economic capital typically consists of

factors like salary, the level of material-technical conditions for scientific activities and the

accessibility of external funds. The relatively low level of economic capital tends to effect

serious damages on the career trajectory of Global South researchers since they frequently have

to undertake other duties beside their academic work and this “divided or parallel career path”

often results in leaving academy. Finally, the fourth type of capital is the symbolic capital in

the widest sense, which consists of many forms and aspects of contemporary recognition. But

this is not only a matter of vanity, since symbolic capital could be easily transferred to economic

capital. For example, one of the most important manifestations of symbolic capital is the

number of one’s citations, which is a very strong trump-card in a job interview or in the course

of an academic promotion. Other types of symbolic capital are hierarchical positions in tenure

committees or in editorial boards of prestigious journals. In these cases, the capital consists of

the power of one individual to give or deny capital to and from other agents on the field. Finally,

the number of publications in prestigious journals should be conceived as symbolic capital

which, similarly to the citations scores, could be transferred to economic capital through

promotion. Furthermore, some institutions premiate the publication of SSCI indexed articles

even financially.

The field of struggle in CMS: heterodox and orthodox scholars

The field of struggle is the “place” where scientific revolutions start to develop by the

nonconformist activity of heterodox scholars (Bourdieu, 2004). As in the case of any sciences,

we can differentiate between push and pull activities in CMS: while the former involves the

(mostly critical) activities of yet peripheral “heterodox” scholars, the latter relates to the (mostly

conservative) activities of more central “orthodox” agents. Heterodox scholars, therefore,

frequently criticize the publication bias towards Global South authors. Typical theoretical

frameworks for explaining the phenomenon of scientific inequalities are dependency theory

(Ferraro, 2008; Prebisch, 1959; Thomas-Slayter, 2003) and Matthew Effect, especially the

theory of the Matthew Effect for Countries (Bonitz, Bruckner and Scharnhorst, 1997).

Dependency theories had been invented as a reaction to the popular Modernization Theory of

the first half of the 20th century. The first class of dependency theories dates back to Prebisch

(1959), who has a Marxist conception on the global economic system. His most important

statements were that 1) the center derived (at least partly) its wealth from the periphery 2) the

relationship between subdominant and dominant states is an enduring one and 3) the only

chance for a dependent area to become a center is that it should break away from the old,

dominant center (Love, 1980). As an addition to the existing bias towards Global South authors,

we have the Matthew Effect for Countries that says even Global South authors may succeed in

publishing their work in leading journals, they will be less cited that their developed country

colleagues: A minority of countries, expecting a high number of citations per scientific paper,

gains more citations than expected, while the majority of countries, expecting only a low

Demeter, M. 101

number of citations per scientific paper, achieves fewer citations than expected. In the spirit of

Merton we called this effect Matthew Effect for Countries (Bonitz, Bruckner and Scharnhorst

1997, 408). Authors from different regions of the Global South investigated the nature and

possible causes of these inequalities. There are profound analyses on this topic from South

America (Jalata, 1993; Perez, 1990), from Africa (Amadi, 2012; Onyancha, 2016), from Asia

(Hung, 2016; Myrdal, 1974; Yutisri, 2016) and from Eastern Europe as well (Bruszt and

Gerkovits, 2009; Bruszt and Langbein, 2017; Demeter, 2018b). But with the so-called de-

Westernization theories of some Global North scholars the “pull effect” also started to play on

the field of struggles in CMS (Rothenberger et al., 2015; Waisbord, 2015a; Waisbord, 2015b;

Waisbord and Mellado, 2014; Wang, 2014). De-Westernization means, at least theoretically,

the critic of West-centrism of the field: “The critique of Euro–American centrism in

communication theories has in recent years led to calls for Afrocentric/Asiacentric approaches

to research, and the emergence of geocultural theories. The discussion has underscored the

urgency for us to re-examine the way cultural differences are handled in academic discourse”.

(Wang 2014,373). According to Waisbord and Mellado (2014), de-Westernization should be

related to scholars, topics, themes, ideas, methods, experiences, epistemologies, theoretical

perspectives and academic cultures. Sivlio Waisbord, current editor of ICAs flagship Journal

of Communication clearly expresses his conception regarding de-Westernization in his 2015s

editorial: “JoC also needs to reflect the globalization of ICA and the field of communication.

[...] It needs to give visibility to arguments that invite us to rethink conclusions largely drawn

from studies conducted in the United States and a few countries in the West. JoC needs to be

embedded in the globalized academia to enrich analytical perspectives, broaden research

horizons, and connect diverse academic cultures of communication scholarship”. (Waisbord

2015a, 586-587). Notwithstanding, if we take a look on the national diversity of Journal of

Communication’s publication output before and after the above discussed de-Westernization

plans we could not find any significant changes in this respect (Table 1).

Table 1. World regions’ contribution in Journal of Communication in the period 2013-2014

and between 2016-2017

Global North South America Asia Eastern Europe Africa Middle East

2016-2017

US 59 Chile 3 China 2 Poland 1 South Africa 1 Turkey 1

UK 12 Mexico 2 Singapore 2

Germany 11 Colombia 1 Hong Kong 1

Netherlands 8 Philippines 1

Israel 6

Australia 4

Austria 4

Spain 4

Belgium 3

Finland 2

Switzerland 2

Canada 1

Iceland 1

Norway 1

Sweden 1

119 6 6 1 1 1

2013-2014

US 80 Chile 2 Korea 3

Germany 12 China 2

Netherlands 9 Singapore 2

Austria 3 Hong Kong 1

Switzerland 3 Taiwan 1

Australia 2

Belgium 2

Israel 2

Italy 2

Denmark 1

UK 1

117 2 9 0 0 0

Demeter, M. 102

Data show that the contribution of the Global North is around 90 percent in both time periods,

and the Global South failed to raise its publication output. The contribution of the US has been

slightly decreased but mostly in favor of other Global North regions, typically Western

European countries and not for the benefit of Global South authors. The inequality between

different regions of the Global South still holds: the developing Asia (mostly China) and South

America have certain contribution in CMS, the participation of other regions like the Middle

East, Africa and Eastern Europe was and is still absolutely unnoticeable. We have to admit,

however, that since we do not have data on submitted but only on published articles, we could

not tell whether this low contribution of the Global South is due to the lack of submissions or

the result of high reject ratios towards authors from this region. Nevertheless, even if we could

not ascertain the exact causes yet, we could still draw the conclusion that de-Westernization

aspirations of the center couldn’t raise the contribution of the Global South at this time.

We have just presented a very narrow research that shows de-Westernization is far from

being achieved in CMS. Since in this rather theoretical article we do not concentrate on

conducting diversified empirical research, we could just refer to other, more empirical studies

that show the same strong bias against Global South papers in terms of publication output

(Demeter, 2018a; Freelon, 2013; Lauf, 2005; Waisbord, 2015a; Waisbord, 2015b; Wang,

2014).

Beside leading periodicals like the above mentioned Journal of Communication,

international academic associations also recognized the importance of de-Westernization

(Meyen, 2012; Wiedemann and Meyen, 2016; Zelizer, 2015). Nevertheless, their research show

that most fellows of the ICA has exclusively American background, and all fellows has very

strong, typically educational relations to the Global North. It seems from data that it is almost

impossible to became an internationally recognized scholar in CMS without a massive measure

of Global North capital.

Today, ICA’s international leadership is located in world regions closely linked to the

United States and educated at U.S. universities or heavily influenced by North American

research traditions, even if it includes a numerous contributions from other associations and

alternative approaches […].National academic environments in U.S.-affiliated countries

became Americanized, especially via ICA fellows serving as role models to get scientific

capital. Thus, ICA’s efforts to expand its leadership are assumed to have an unintended effect

of conserving the power structures in the field. (Wiedemann and Meyen, 2016, p. 1489).

It is noteworthy, that Wiedemann and Meyen deals with mostly de-Americanization

that means they consider non-American ICA fellows’ career paths and found that they have

strong and manifold relations to the US. But from their data we could abstract an even more

striking fact, namely, that there are no Global South scholars amongst ICA fellows, former and

future presidents at all. From the 112 distinguished ICA fellows there are 86 from the US,

followed by Germany (4), the UK (3), Canada (3), Israel (3), Australia (2), the Netherlands (2),

Singapore (2), and we have 1-1 fellows from Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, South

Korea, Japan and Hong-Kong. As the authors accurately observed, “for ICA going international

means going to rich, economically strong countries.” (Wiedemann and Meyen, 2016, p. 1496).

As a conclusion we can say that center-based pull-efforts or de-Westernization attempts in the

field of struggle haven’t succeed in raising the contribution of the Global South in CMS. There

is no significant accession in the number of Global South articles in leading CMS periodicals,

and the participation of Global South fellows in most prestigious academic associations is

totally unnoticeable.

Demeter, M. 103

An attempt to synthesize Bourdieusian concepts

Although the use of Bourdieusian concepts is quote common amongst social scientists,

specialists often argue that sometimes it is hard to find satisfactory agreement regarding the

correct sense of the original notions (Grenfell, 2008; Shusterman, 1999; Thatcher et al., 2016).

The cause of this ambiguity is likely the fact that Bourdieusian concepts tend to define each

other mutually, so the linear exposition of his field theory is rather hard to develop. Therefore,

we chose a network style exposition for our attempt to synthesize field theory and its main

concepts, therefore all the main concepts will be related to each other (Fig. 5).

Figure 5. The synthesized network of field theory’s main concepts

In our understanding, there is no central concept in field theory; instead we have four central

concepts (habitus, capital, field and norm) plus an additional one, namely, the agent who acts

in the social field. Thus we will start our exposition with the agents that could be individual,

collective or institutional. On an individual agent we mean individual researchers with

appropriate capital for acting successfully on the field by certain norms. If the agent’s

performance is successful at a given field, then that agent has the fitting habitus. But as

individual agents collect individual capital (in the form of citations, for example), collective

and institutional agents save collective or institutional capital. Examples for collective agents

are research teams and laboratories, while universities, disciplines, countries and world regions

and even science in itself could be conceived as institutional agents. For not just the individual

researchers but also research teams and whole regions (even as great ones as the Global South

itself) strive for being represented in the map of international science, they tend to accumulate

capital collectively. The strife or field of struggle where science as a whole competes is slightly

different from the situations where the competition runs inside the field of science: here science

Demeter, M. 104

competes with other social institutions like health care, culture or sports for a finite amount of

state or public fund.

Just like as capital could be collected individually or collectively, habitus could be

internalized by either an individual or a collective agent. Since a habitus is always the habitus

of an (individual or collective) agent, the concept of the former could not be conceived without

the latter. It is always the (physical, cognitive, affective, ethical or institutional) structure of a

given agent that support (or prohibit) the development of a given habitus and the whole process,

namely, the internalization of the habitus happens on and by the rules of the field of forces. In

return, the field of forces consists of, basically, individual and collective agents which play

different power roles on the same field. While agents’ habitus could be modified by the field

of forces via different pull and push effects, norms are much more resistant to change since

they are originated and usually institutionalized in the field of forces. In other words, norms

control the field of forces while habitus control the behavior of the agents. The function and

dynamics of norms on the level of the field is quite similar to the function and dynamics of

habitus on the level of the individual or collective agents. Just like agents (of a given field)

could be conceived as embodied fields of forces (Bourdieu, 2004) we can say that habitus is

the individualized and agent-specific realization of ruling norms.

As it is represented on Fig. 5, we could draw a synthesized network of field theory’s

main concepts. Since this network should be conceived as a connected graph, we could start

the interpretation from any concept. When we select, for example, the concept of agent, we will

see its immediate connections with habitus via learning, and with the field of forces via push

and pull effects. In other words, the main goal of agents is to get better positions at the field of

forces while other agents on the field of forces determine the availability of every possible

positions. Since agents could reach this goal by collecting academic capital, they have to learn

the appropriate habitus by which it can be achieved as fast as it is possible. This collected capital

serve as trumps on the field of forces: the more capital you have the more likely you will get

top positions here. Norms, which are the most stable elements of the network control the field

of forces by determining the rules of the academic competition on the one hand, and, on the

other hand, they serve as models for the appropriate habitus that is the agent-specific

implementation of ruling norms.

Conclusions

In this paper we aimed to contribute to the literature of communication theory in general, and

to Bourdieusian field theory in particular in two ways.

First, we tried to show that the large quantity of information we have regarding Global

North – Global South inequalities in communication and media studies needs to be interpreted

in a coherent theoretical framework, and Bourdieu’s frame theory proved to be adequate for

this role. This is also the first study in which the empirically tested performance of CMS’s

field of forces was discussed theoretically. In other words, we could theoretically interpret data

from former empirical research and, at the same time, we could corroborate field theory through

connecting data to the appropriate theoretical concepts of field theory.

Second, we tried to synthetize the main concepts of Bourdieu’s field theory to show their

relatedness. Our conceptual analysis shown that the linear development of the theory might be

extremely hard and even confusing since all the main concepts define each other, so we chose

to use a network style exposition. Our attempt to synthetize the theory’s basic concepts resulted

in a network of concepts in which the connections between the main elements are easy to

follow.

Communication scholars – similarly to their peers in other disciplines – tend to function

in an unreflective way. Norms, and through norms, habitus are internalized by culture, role

Demeter, M. 105

models and education unconsciously. The fact that communication scholars collect academic

capital to get better positions at the field of forces could be obscured by popular narratives on

the purity and unselfishness of science: that’s why Bourdieu wrote that we should not listen to

just what scientist say but what they actually do (Bourdieu, 2004). Through the norms which

control the field of forces many one-sided practices fixate, and it results in serious biases against

agents outside the field of forces. In spite of the fact that the so-called de-Westernization

attempts strive to reduce Global North – Global South inequalities we could not see significant

changes yet. Accordingly, being familiar with the operations in the field of forces in CMS might

be very useful for not just those peripheral scholars who want to raise their prospects but for all

those agents at the Global North who strive for a more equal and unbiased field of forces in

CMS.

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